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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • That’s most of what we do today.

    Every web app you use right now - which is most of your day for most users - is just a dumb terminal UI hitting some API on some foreign computer.

    Plan 9 uses the file system as a way of interacting with apis. Linux took this idea directly by copying in the/proc filesystem from 9, which are not bytes on a disk but are instead the kernel presenting its running processes in the format of files and directories in your file namespace, and with which you can interact to control those processes.

    It also took this idea and created FUSE - file systems in user space - so that you can do the same thing on Linux as a user, but with not quite the same ease you have on plan 9 - and notably, fuse file systems are not naturally network file systems, and so you can’t export them as easily to the network as you can with nine machines, where it’s implicit.

    Last, Linux took the idea of per-process namespaces from 9, setting the stage for all of the docker, snap, etc. tools we use today.

    In short, a lot of nine already is mainstream because it’s been adopted by Linux. However, using plan 9 and then returning back to Linux feels like putting on bulky gloves, because Linux did not start with these concepts in mind, but bolted them on after.

    /Tinyrant




  • A negative income tax system has the same incentive as our current bracketed tax system to earn more money: for every dollar you earn, even if a higher percentage gets taken out on that next dollar, you still have more money now.

    It just shifts our brackets down so that you get “negatively taxed” - given money - for the lowest brackets of income. But a person making $100k would still be given say $15k for the first $10k of their income, $5k for next $10k, taxed at 9% for the next $10k, 20% the following $10k, so on and so forth - so that every dollar they make still means more money in their pocket, it’s just a percentage less for the additional dollars as they move brackets. Considering that’s already how it works, it seems no incentive changes would arise for high earners.




  • From one of the admins:

    To the people who are like “What did you expect to happen when you picked a .af domain, are you idiots?”

    Yes, we were aware of the possibility of suspension from the start Yes, we were aware that political circumstances could change But thumbing your nose at conservative autocrats as an even minor form of protest is fun In the end pretty much everyone has migrated out successfully (and I’ll continue to help anyone who remains) We’ve all gotten a fun story out of this

    I’ve been signalling the probable demise of queer.af to my followers for the past year. We knew the end was coming; we just anticipated it to take a little longer

    So long; it was fun while it lasted.


  • It’s convenient. Can’t hurt to get used to it, for sure, in that it’s useful to not have to go through dependency hell installing things sometimes. It’s based on kernel features I don’t see Linus pulling out, so I think you’ll only see it more.

    As someone who runs nix-only at home, I mostly use its underlying tech in the form of snaps/flatpaks, though. I use docker itself at work constantly, but at home, snaps/flatpaks tend to do the “minimize thinking about dependencies and building” bit but in a workflow more convenient for desktop applications.